Public radio host gained insight from poker

You don’t have to be a poker player to benefit from learning the rules of the game. Jad Abumrad, co-host of the public radio show “Radiolab,” doesn’t play poker, but has considered what Texas Hold’em odds can teach us about life.

“What I learned is that an understanding of odds is in some way a recognition that you’re going to have a certain amount of failure. So you have to be comfortable with a high degree of uncertainty and still make a bet,” said Abumrad, who has conducted interviews with top poker pros such as Annie Duke for his show.

He added, “It was a revelation to learn about pot odds,” a calculation weighing the amount a player has to risk in relation to how much he or she can win, as well as the odds of winning. For Abumrad, that understanding was an aha moment that has implications far beyond poker.

“You take the concept of pot odds and apply it to decision-making in your life. You ask yourself, ‘OK, based on the amount I could get back from this bet, how certain do I need to be?’ And that question, how certain do I need to be in any given instance, has been amazing for me and my work,” said Abumrad, who is slated to appear with Sonoma County cellist Zoe Keating on Saturday, Jan. 28, in Santa Rosa, for a live show they call “Gut Churn,” billed as “a discussion complemented by an intriguing layer of sound.”

“So I actually try in a really dumb way to think about the pot odds of any situation. I have to ask myself, ‘What would a poker player do in this moment?’ I need to make a basic decision like, ‘Do we go forward on the story or not?’”

Abumrad believes poker “has a lot to teach someone like me, so I talk a lot about this on the show, how I started trying to use poker as real guiding philosophy.”

“It feels like a shortcut to Buddhism in a weird way. ... You begin to be comfortable with failure and to be comfortable with the fact that you can’t control certain things, but you can still make decisions,” he said. “That’s really been useful for me because the worst kind of uncertainty is where it paralyzes you. The best kind is where you just acknowledge, ‘OK, I don’t know what can happen, but I’m still going to try stuff.’ I feel that poker players have to do that or they’ll suck.”

Understanding the odds doesn’t mean that every decision will be correct, but “if you were to make that decision 1,000 times, you’d come out ahead. The whole thing is somehow encapsulated in that realization.”